Long-term Trade-off Research Articles

Land use transformations in the Brazilian Savanna: A decade of soil erosion and runoff measurements

Changes in land cover and land use (LULC) are one of the main drivers of erosion and runoff. How ever, most research has relied on short-term observations and only focused on one or two land cover types. We investigated the long-term trade-off between common agricultural land covers (sugarcane, pasture, and soybean), runoff, and soil loss rates. We compared these to native forest (wooded Cerrado) and bare soil. The field observations were done in 100 m2 experimental plots in Brazil maintained during the past 10 years. The paper provides three main contributions: (1) long-term runoff and soil loss rates of plots under different LULCs, (2) comparison of runoff, soil loss, and pedological characteristics between plots constructed 10 years apart, and (3) analysis of the trade-off between different LULCs. When ranking land covers based on runoff and soil loss rates, there is a shift in ranking positions, making it difficult to determine which one is more environmentally harmful. However, it is evident that whatever agricultural practice is used, there is a significant impact when compared to native forest. For example, the area converted to pasture resulted in almost 20 times higher runoff, while conversion to sugarcane resulted in 5 times higher soil loss. Not only land cover plays a major influencing factor, but also weathering exposing time. Areas under the same land cover and environmental conditions had different rates of soil loss and runoff due to long-term exposure effects such as soil crusting. Our findings have high relevance for the hydrological and agricultural community by demonstrating (i) the magnitude of trade-off in terms of soil loss and runoff due to land cover changes and (ii) that soil loss should not be assumed to be a linear process over time, as it is commonly assumed.

Year-round weather alters nest-provisioning rates in a migratory owl.

As global temperatures and precipitation become more extreme, habitat specialists are at particular risk of being pushed past their environmental tolerance limits. Flammulated Owls (Psiloscops flammeolus) are small migratory owls that breed in temperate conifer forests of western North America. Their highly specialized nesting and foraging requirements make them indicators of ecosystem health. Using 17 years of nest observations, we investigated how annual weather patterns affected Flammulated Owl nesting and foraging behaviors during the breeding season. We used generalized linear models with a changepoint parameter to evaluate nest provisioning and nestling growth rates in years of extreme temperature and precipitation. We also evaluated how adult mass, division of labor, and productivity varied based on precipitation and temperature. Compared to wet and warm years, adults made more frequent prey deliveries to nestlings in dry and cold years, particularly early in the night and early in the season, and they experienced earlier changepoints in these years. We found a significant effect of temperature on the number of fledglings in broods, but weather did not affect other variables including productivity, nestling growth rates, adult masses, and division of labor. Our findings suggest that extreme annual weather patterns influence insect prey availability during the Flammulated Owl breeding season, forcing adults to work harder to provision for nests during dry and cold years. While productivity and nestling growth did not vary between years, these may incur a long-term tradeoff in adult survival.

Upside down and the game of C allocation.

Non-structural carbohydrates (NSCs) represent the primary carbon (C) reserves and play a crucial role for plant functioning and resilience. Indeed, these compounds are involved in the regulation between C supply and demand, and in the maintenance of hydraulic efficiency. NSCs are stored in parenchyma of woody organs, which is recognized as a proxy for reserve storage capacity of tree. Notwithstanding the importance of NSCs for tree physiology, their long-term regulation and trade-offs against growth were not deeply investigated. This work evaluated the long-term dynamics of mature tree reserves in stem and root, proxied by parenchyma features, and focusing on the trade off and interplay between the resources allocation in radial growth and reserves in stem and coarse root. In a Mediterranean beech forest, NSCs content, stem and root wood anatomy analysis, and eddy covariance data, were combined. The parenchyma fraction (RAP) of beech root and stem was different, due to differences in axial parenchyma (AP) and narrow ray parenchyma (nRP) fractions. However, these parenchyma components and radial growth showed synchronous inter-annual dynamics between the two organs. In beech stem, positive correlations were found among soluble sugars content and nRP, and among starch content and the AP. Positive correlations were found among Net Ecosystem Exchange (NEE) and AP of both organs. In contrast, NEE was negatively correlated to radial growth of root and stem. Our results suggest a different contribution of stem and roots to reserves storage, and a putative partitioning in the functional roles of parenchyma components. Moreover, a long-term trade-off of C allocation between growth and reserve pool was evidenced. Indeed, in case of C source reduction, trees preferentially allocate C towards reserves pool. Conversely, in high productive years, growth represents the major C sink.

Dual-Effect Salt-Tolerant Slope-Suspended Solar Evaporators: High Evaporation Efficiency and Industrialized Implementation

Construction of Janus-wetting interfaces in solar thermal evaporation is one of the most widely applied strategies to overcome salt accumulation to prolong a system’s lifetime. Nevertheless, hydrophobicity and steam escape in traditional Janus floating evaporators are negatively correlated, resulting in the trade-off between salt resistance and the evaporation rate. Herein, a scalable suspended-slope evaporator (SSE) based on the inverse wettability polypyrrole (PPy) fabric is designed to surmount the long-term trade-off for achieving continuous and stable high-rate water desalination. Experiments and numerical simulations indicate that the suspended structure opens the “shackles” brought by the upper hydrophobic PPy fabric to steam escape, and the Marangoni convection induced by the inclined structure further enhances salt resistance performance. With this structure employed, SSEs present good salt tolerance (no obvious salt accumulation in 21 wt % brine for 5 h) and excellent solar evaporation performance (evaporation rate of 2.46 kg m–2 h–1 in 3.5 wt % brine, and the energy efficiency is 85.48%). Additionally, there is no need for special customized high-pressure equipment in the whole synthesis process, which has great significance for the widespread practical application. This work elucidates the intrinsic effects of the device structure on solar evaporators while providing insights for designing high-efficiency and salt-tolerant solar evaporators.

Stoma versus anastomosis after sphincter-sparing rectal cancer resection; the impact on health-related quality of life

BackgroundSurgical resection is the mainstay of curative treatment for rectal cancer. Post-operative complications, low anterior resection syndrome (LARS), and the presence of a stoma may influence the quality of life after surgery. This study aimed to gain more insights into the long-term trade-off between stoma and anastomosis.MethodsAll patients who underwent sphincter-sparing surgical resection for rectal cancer in the Leiden University Medical Center and the Reinier de Graaf Gasthuis between January 2012 and January 2016 were included. Patients received the following questionnaires: EORTC-QLQ-CR29, EORTC-QLQ-C30, EQ-5D-5L, and the LARS score. A comparison was made between patients with a stoma and without a stoma after follow-up.ResultsSome 210 patients were included of which 149 returned the questionnaires (70.9%), after a mean follow-up of 3.69 years. Overall quality of life was not significantly different in patients with and without stoma after follow-up using the EORTC-QLQ-C30 (p = 0.15) or EQ-5D-5L (p = 0.28). However, after multivariate analysis, a significant difference was found for the presence of a stoma on global health status (p = 0.01) and physical functioning (p < 0.01). Additionally, there was no difference detected in the quality of life between patients with major LARS or a stoma.ConclusionThis study shows that after correction for possible confounders, a stoma is associated with lower global health status and physical functioning. However, no differences were found in health-related quality of life between patients with major LARS and patients with a stoma. This suggests that the choice between stoma and anastomosis is mainly preferential and that shared decision-making is required.

At the crossroad between green and thirsty: Carbon emissions and water consumption of Spanish thermoelectricity generation, 1969–2019

The energy sector is the main contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and one of the thirstiest sectors worldwide. Within the energy sector, thermoelectricity directly impacts on both emissions and water. This study assesses the evolution of the direct CO2 emissions and operational water consumption of the Spanish thermoelectricity generation from 1969 to 2019. Both carbon emissions and water consumption correlate over time, led by the trends in total thermal generation, although over the past half century, water requirements swelled far more than carbon emissions. This results in a long-term trade-off between carbon emissions and consumptive water use in relative terms: while the CO2 per thermal MWh generated halved since 1969 in Spain, the operational water consumption per MWh of thermoelectricity generated more than doubled due to switching from coal burning to nuclear and combined cycle technologies. We find no real trade-off in absolute levels. Although moving towards smaller environmental impacts since the mid-2000s, thermoelectricity remains one of the largest carbon emitters while becoming one of thirstiest energy technologies in Spain.

Saving for Retirement in Europe: The Long-Term Risk-Return Tradeoff

Saving for Retirement in Europe: The Long-Term Risk-Return Tradeoff

OPTIMAL CLIMATE POLICY IN 3D: MITIGATION, CARBON REMOVAL, AND SOLAR GEOENGINEERING

We introduce solar geoengineering (SG) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) into an integrated assessment model to analyze the trade-offs between mitigation, SG, and CDR. We propose a novel empirical parameterization of SG that disentangles its efficacy, calibrated with climate model results, from its direct impacts. We use a simple parameterization of CDR that decouples it from the scale of baseline emissions. We find that (a) SG optimally delays mitigation and lowers the use of CDR, which is distinct from moral hazard; (b) SG is deployed prior to CDR while CDR drives the phasing out of SG in the far future; (c) SG deployment in the short term is relatively independent of discounting and of the long-term trade-off between SG and CDR over time; (d) small amounts of SG sharply reduce the cost of meeting a [Formula: see text]C target and the costs of climate change, even with a conservative calibration for the efficacy of SG.

Regulation, quality reporting and third-party certification of healthcare providers.

The newly established provincial healthcare commissions in Pakistan have started certification of healthcare providers. The policy-makers perceive that without third-party certification or licencing the healthcare quality will be suboptimal in the country. This paper reviews the current literature on third-party certification and studies objectives and progress of the largest healthcare commission in Pakistan. It analyses the certification role of the Punjab Healthcare Commission and draw lessons for future regulation and strengthening of the quality reporting process. It also documents the short-term and long-term trade-off resulting from the enforcement of quality certification in the absence of appropriate alternative investment in medical training and care provisions in the country for uncertified providers. The paper concludes with a roadmap for future research to improve healthcare regulation in Pakistan.

Aggression, glucocorticoids, and the chronic costs of status competition for wild male chimpanzees

Across vertebrates, high social status affords preferential access to resources, and is expected to correlate positively with health and longevity. Increasing evidence, however, suggests that although dominant females generally enjoy reduced exposure to physiological and psychosocial stressors, dominant males do not. Here we test the hypothesis that costly mating competition by high-ranking males results in chronic, potentially harmful elevations in glucocorticoid production. We examined urinary glucocorticoids (n = 8029 samples) in a 20-year longitudinal study of wild male chimpanzees (n = 20 adults) in the Kanyawara community of Kibale National Park, Uganda. We tested whether glucocorticoid production was associated with dominance rank in the long term, and with mating competition and dominance instability in the short term. Using mixed models, we found that both male aggression and glucocorticoid excretion increased when the dominance hierarchy was unstable, and when parous females were sexually available. Glucocorticoid excretion was positively associated with male rank in stable and unstable hierarchies, and in mating and non-mating contexts. Glucorticoids increased with both giving and receiving aggression, but giving aggression was the primary mechanism linking elevated glucocorticoids with high rank. Glucocorticoids also increased with age. Together these results show that investment in male-male competition increases cumulative exposure to glucocorticoids, suggesting a long-term tradeoff with health that may constrain the ability to maintain high status across the life course. Our data suggest that the relationship between social rank and glucocorticoid production often differs in males and females owing to sex differences in the operation of sexual selection.

Long-term dynamics of production in western Mediterranean seagrass meadows: Trade-offs and legacies of past disturbances

Seagrasses are marine angiosperms that can form highly productive, and valuable underwater meadows, which are currently in regression. A reliable assessment of their status and future evolution requires studies encompassing long-term temporal scales. With the aim of understanding seagrass ecosystem dynamics over the last centuries and millennia, twelve sediment cores were studied from seagrass meadows located along the Andalusian coast and at the Cabrera Island (western Mediterranean). This study is pioneer in using Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy as a tool to study environmental change in seagrass sediments. FTIR is a form of vibrational spectroscopy that provides information about the sediment chemical composition. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to summarise spatio-temporal data of the FTIR vibratory peaks in combination with climate and geochemical proxy data. Several PCA signals were identified: (1) one likely related to the relative changes of the main primary producers and the sedimentary environment (carbonate or siliciclastic sediments, with aromatic or aliphatic organic matter); (2) the marine community production (polysaccharides, total organic matter content and biogenic silica); and (3) the seagrass production (aromatics, carbohydrates, phenols, proteins and lipids). A decrease of seagrass production along the mainland coast was evident since AD ~1850, which may be due to combined negative impacts of seawater warming, local anthropogenic impacts, and extreme setting conditions. The legacy of these combined stressors might have influenced the current poor state of seagrass meadows in the Alboran Sea. Our results also revealed a significant long-term trade-off between the level of seagrass production and its temporal stability (calculated as the inverse of the coefficient of variation). This study provides a reliable baseline data, helping to assess the magnitude of seagrass regression and its drivers. This paleoecological information can help design more targeted management plans and identify meadows where local management could be more efficient.

Comparative analysis of unemployment and inflation in Mexico

The article examines, based on panel regressions, the long-term relationship between inflation and economic growth based on information for 70 countries and annual data for 1950-2010 The results do not find evidence of a significant trade-off between in fl ation and long-term growth for this sample and period, except if national experiences with average annual in fl ations above the annual 65% threshold are included. That is, outside regimes with persistently very high rates of inflation, there is no systematic or significant inverse relationship between inflation and the growth rate of productive activity. The absence of such long-term trade-off for the aggregate panel is far from implying that for any individual economy the inflation undermines its growth only if it exceeds the 65% per annum The analysis by groups of countries reveals that the value of the threshold of significance is a function of the current monetary regime.

The crowbar model of method and its implications

There is a rough, long-term tradeoff between rate of innovation and degree of strong realism in scientific practice, a point reflected in historically changing conceptions of method as they retreat from epistemological foundationism to a highly fallibilistic, modeling perspective. The successively more liberal, innovation-stimulating methods open up to investigation deep theoretical domains at the cost, in many cases, of moving away from strong realism as a likely outcome of research. The crowbar model of method highlights this tension, expressed as the crowbar compromiseand the crowbar fallacy. The tools-to-theories heuristic, described and evaluated by Gigerenzer and colleagues, can be regarded as an attempt by some scientific realists to overcome this compromise. Instead, it is an instance of it. Nonetheless, in successful applications the crowbar model implies a modest, instrumental (nonrepresentational) realism.

Effects of Experimental Warming on Growing Season Temperature and Carbon Exchange in an Alpine Tundra Ecosystem

Accurate assessing CO2 exchange of tundra ecosystems is essential for better understanding and prediction of the CO2 responses of tundra ecosystems to climate change. In this study, the effects of warming on growing season CO2 exchange in an alpine tundra ecosystem were examined with closed transparent chamber attached to an infrared gas analyzer. Compared to ambient controls, open-top chambers (OTCs) increased growing season air (15 cm above ground surface) and soil (10 cm in depth) temperature by 1 and 0.2°C, respectively. Compared to the controls, OTCs tended to increase the plant height of Dryas octopetala and Vaccinium uliginosum by 15.1% (but P > 0.05) and 7.5% (P > 0.05), respectively. During the growing season, OTC-warming increased net ecosystem CO2 exchange by 136% and gross ecosystem exchange by 63%, whereas no significant difference in ecosystem respiration was found. Our results suggest that the predicted air warming will increase ecosystem carbon uptake of the Changbai Mountain alpine tundra during growing season. However, there is an uncertainty about the net CO2 exchange of that ecosystem at an annual scale, because, due to the inaccessibility, we did not study the winter respiration. Further studies are, therefore, needed to estimate the annual and long-term trade-off between CO2 uptake and emission in that region.

Does haste always make waste? Service quantity, service quality, and incentives in speed-intensive service firms

Research demonstrates a tradeoff between service quantity and service quality that creates a tension for firms who wish to incentivize both aspects of service performance. We propose a category of speed-intensive services in which prompt responsiveness is the primary driver of service quality. In these firms, service quantity and quality should exhibit a positive interrelationship. Daily data on service quantity and quality performance were collected for 24 months, for a total of 1414 observations, from a telephone directory service firm, an affiliate of major telecommunication firm in an Asian country. We use a generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation to test their interrelationship and the effect of financial incentives on service performance. Contrary to the typical tradeoff effect, the results reveal that service quantity positively affects service quality performance and vice versa. In addition, we surprisingly find that incentives have no effect on service quantity performance and decrease service quality performance, and that overall performance declines with employee experience. This suggests that these firms do not face a tradeoff between service quantity and quality, but may face a long-term tradeoff between customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction.

Exploring the long-term trade-off between efficiency and value creation in horizontal M&As

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the voluntary horizontal M&A impact on operating performance in Nigeria between 1995 and 2012 under different complementary approaches.Design/methodology/approachResidual income valuation (RIV), economic value-added (EVA), data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA).FindingsResults showed a statistically significant improvement in the technical efficiency of both bidder and target companies, the reduced efficiency levels of the bidder firms under DEA scores reveals the specifics of the productive technology. This may suggest that resulting merged companies in Nigeria may have not even become too big in scale or even reached the most productive scale size, despite their almost monopolistic position in the sector. This happens because the scale size of the sector is small per se, implying that the investments necessary to achieve synergistic gains have to be partially covered by price increases.Practical implicationsThis study will guide both the M&A practitioners, investment banks, and the policy makes. In terms of having to review M&A policy as well as seeing to the improvement in the infrastructural needs.Social implicationsWith improved performance, employment can be created thereby giving employment to the youths. This will reduce social problems.Originality/valueFrom the literature and records, no long-term operating performance on voluntary mergers and acquisitions has not been carried out in Nigeria. The paper seeks to know the fundamental value of the firms after these transactions with the current methodology that is acceptable from the literature.

Trade-off between carotenoid-based sexual ornamentation and sperm resistance to oxidative challenge.

It has been hypothesized that carotenoid-based sexual ornamentation signals male fertility and sperm competitive ability as both ornamentation and sperm traits may be co-affected by oxidative stress, resulting in positive covariation (the 'redox-based phenotype-linked fertility hypothesis'; redox-based PLFH). On the other hand, the 'sperm competition theory' (SCT) predicts a trade-off between precopulatory and postcopulatory traits. Here, we manipulate oxidative status (using diquat dibromide) and carotenoid availability in adult zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) males in order to test whether carotenoid-based beak ornamentation signals, or is traded off against, sperm resistance to oxidative challenge. Initial beak colouration, but not its change during the experiment, was associated with effect of oxidative challenge on sperm velocity, such that more intense colouration predicted an increase in sperm velocity under control conditions but a decline under oxidative challenge. This suggests a long-term trade-off between ornament expression and sperm resistance to oxidative challenge. Shortening of the sperm midpiece following oxidative challenge further suggests that redox homeostasis may constrain sperm morphometry. Carotenoid supplementation resulted in fewer sperm abnormalities but had no effect on other sperm traits. Overall, our data challenge the redox-based PLFH, partially support the SCT and highlight the importance of carotenoids for normal sperm morphology.

The Effects of Revealed Information on Catastrophe Loss Projection Models' Characterization of Risk: Damage Vulnerability Evidence from Florida.

We examine whether the risk characterization estimated by catastrophic loss projection models is sensitive to the revelation of new information regarding risk type. We use commercial loss projection models from two widely employed modeling firms to estimate the expected hurricane losses of Florida Atlantic University's building stock, both including and excluding secondary information regarding hurricane mitigation features that influence damage vulnerability. We then compare the results of the models without and with this revealed information and find that the revelation of additional, secondary information influences modeled losses for the windstorm-exposed university building stock, primarily evidenced by meaningful percent differences in the loss exceedance output indicated after secondary modifiers are incorporated in the analysis. Secondary risk characteristics for the data set studied appear to have substantially greater impact on probable maximum loss estimates than on average annual loss estimates. While it may be intuitively expected for catastrophe models to indicate that secondary risk characteristics hold value for reducing modeled losses, the finding that the primary value of secondary risk characteristics is in reduction of losses in the "tail" (low probability, high severity) events is less intuitive, and therefore especially interesting. Further, we address the benefit-cost tradeoffs that commercial entities must consider when deciding whether to undergo the data collection necessary to include secondary information in modeling. Although we assert the long-term benefit-cost tradeoff is positive for virtually every entity, we acknowledge short-term disincentives to such an effort.

Trend inflation, the labor market wedge, and the non-vertical Phillips curve

Recent developments in macroeconomics resurrect the view that welfare costs of inflation arise because the latter acts as a tax on money balances. Empirical contributions show that wage re-negotiations take place while expiring contracts are still in place. Bringing these seemingly unrelated aspects together in a stylized general equilibrium model, we find a disciplining effect of a positive inflation target on the wage markup and identify a long-term trade-off between inflation and output. This has important policy implications, ranging from the opportunity of revising the target in response to shocks, to the possibility of exploiting inflation as a tool to increase tax revenues via its employment-enhancing effect.

Gender Discrimination in Property Rights

In the Middle Ages women in the Italian Alps had substantially more rights on collective properties than in the Modern Age. The documental evidence shows a progressive erosion of women’s rights and a convergence toward gender-biased inheritance systems. We tracked the evolution of inheritance regulations on collective land in the peasant communities of Trentino over a period of six centuries (13th-19th). Considering a panel of hundreds of communities, we provide a long-term perspective of institutional change. When population pressure increased, a patrilineal system emerged as a protective measure to preserve the per-capita endowment of collective properties within a community. This study raises general issues about the role of local level versus centralized decision-making in delivering gender equality and about the long-term trade-off between the protection of common resources and a healthy genetic pool at the community level.